John Polacek

Here are some random notes from the various sessions and discussions I’ve had during my time in Austin: Whenever you are looking at a device, you are a cyborg. (via Amber Case) Ray Kurzweil has a lot of really fascinating things to say. Such as.. Bloodstream technology will be mainstream in 20 years. If you [...]

I knew a lot of the stuff that was talked about in the Killer App Design session by Jonathon Morgan, but there was still plenty of valuable food for thought and ideas in there. Also, he was an engaging, comfortable speaker with a good sense of humor, which made for a nice way to start [...]

One of the best sessions I’ve had so far was CSS For Grown-Ups by Andy Hume. Some of the highlights: CSS is ‘Constraint Programming’. Obsession with eliminating ‘classitis’ is outdated and not good practice. The idea of doing a redesign without touching the markup is a myth. Apply OOP principles to CSS. For example, extend [...]

Despite being developers’ favorite CMS whipping boy, WordPress remains the most popular CMS, and it isn’t even close. According to the 2011 Open Source CMS Marketshare Report on CMS Wire, there are over 600,000 downloads of WordPress each month. With its giant install base and continued popularity, WordPress is here to stay. There have been [...]

People have been asking about my Match The Letter game, so I thought I’d make a quick update post about it. I created Match the Letter in order to get familiar with developing native mobile apps. Having done so, I’ve since become more interested in doing web apps and general web design and development. My [...]

Wow, what a great few weeks I’ve had. Things started off when on New Year’s Day I posted my Scrollorama plugin to Hacker News and a couple other places. To my great surprise, it shot up to #1 on HN and stayed on the front page for pretty much the whole day. Then it started [...]

Over my holiday/new-baby-time-off break, I took some time to work on a couple new jQuery plugins that I’ve been thinking about. I’m a fan of the various cool scrolly sites out there like this and this. I also dig slideshow presentation plugins like deck.js and reveal.js With that in mind, I’ve created Scrollorama, the jQuery [...]

At the start of each year, I usually write out a list of things I plan on trying to accomplish professionally. For the last couple of years, these lists have mostly consisted of technologies and programming languages I wanted to learn. This year is different. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of [...]

I’ve just posted a new project to Github. This was a quick easy one. It’s a jQuery plugin for making a simple responsive image gallery that scales to fit the size of its container. The project page is at johnpolacek.github.com/ResponsiveThumbnailGallery

I just set up my Github homepage. I’ve been seeing all these people setting up cool project pages and wanted to get in on it. I’ve been posting code to Github for quite some time (and Google Code before that). I made the switch to Git from SVN awhile back. For my own personal workflow, [...]